Coming together to make every dollar count for our neighbors.
You know why we love our community so much? It’s because good neighbors like YOU show up to make a difference in the lives of their fellow neighbors. Every day.
Since the pandemic, while we were able to keep 22,000 families in their homes and continue to distribute groceries to 6,700 households weekly in partnership with local food banks, we don’t want to stop! With prices of essentials—and the need—rising, our dream? To ensure all people have homes, students graduate and families are financially stable.
That’s why we’re rolling out The Neighbor Fund so we can all come together and help out our neighbors going through a rough time through no fault of their own.
Can you lead with your heart and give today? Let’s make every dollar count. Let’s help every neighbor we can.
At United Way, we believe that unless we realize our dream of a racially just community, we can’t live in a community where ALL people have homes, students graduate and families are financially stable.
To intentionally address systemic racism and the racially inequitable impacts of the pandemic that go beyond, we’re implementing participatory grant-making, a funding model that shifts the decision-making power to the communities impacted by funding decisions. We’re also working with nonprofit partners to spread the word in the communities they serve.
To meet the needs of our neighbors, we’re focusing our efforts to keep people in their homes, keep food on their tables and where their needs are the most.
Fighting Food Insecurity
Many families in King County are increasingly unsure of where their next meal will come from. Over half of those households had children in them.
Not just that, hunger is not equal across communities—32% of Black and 26% of Latino adults experience food insecurity compared to just 7% of white adults.
New applications for food stamps have increased as prices continue to soar.— Throughout the Seattle area, food prices have jumped more than 10 percent since 2021 alone. Food banks are now unable to sustain this increase in demand.
Your donations to The Neighbor Fund can help us fight food insecurity and provide hunger relief to our neighbors right now. With your help, we can help more.
Our Work Includes:
- Delivering 6,700+ boxes of culturally-relevant groceries to households each week through our partnership with DoorDash and dozens of Seattle-area food banks through the United Way Home Grocery Program. 79% of these households were BIPOC-led.
- Fighting hunger in BIPOC communities—$4.4M from King County invested in 36 community organizations—the first such investment of its kind
- Addressing child hunger:
- Supporting school districts across the state in implementing Breakfast After the Bell—helping over 200,000 students have access to healthy meals as schools return to in-person learning.
- Providing technical assistance to schools across Washington, helping get food to 220,000 students per day.
- Weekday deliveries of child meals to 12 affordable housing sites, reaching 1,000 kids every day. We’re scaling the program up to reach 24 sites throughout the county to reach 4,000 hungry children each weekday.
- Getting healthy meals to 3,000 kids through our partnership with FareStart, Seattle Housing Authority and YMCA.
Rental Assistance
We believe that the best way to fight homelessness is to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, United Way has supported more than 22,000 households with rental assistance, distributing over $130 million to cover back rent and help keep people securely housed and avoid potential eviction or homelessness.
In 2022, United Way also led the distribution of $3,890,806 in federal Emergency Food and Shelter Program funds to 34 community-based organizations. Funds will support rental assistance, mortgage assistance, hotel/motel stays, shelter, food, and utilities.
The crisis is far from over. But with your donations to The Neighbor Fund, we can keep more of our neighbors housed.
Supporting Students
Amongst many other things, the COVID-19 pandemic showed us how having an education can help you weather a financial storm. Your donations to The Neighbor Fund can help us meet basic needs for students as early as pre-K and high school through college.
According to a Conversation survey, 48% of community college students said they left college due to the cost-of-living expenses, including rent, utilities, health care and childcare.
Through our Bridge to Finish program, and in the 2021-2022 academic year alone, we connected over 6,112 students to 41, 482 supports! On average, 84% of students who received at least ONE of these supports, completed a credential or persisted to the next quarter at a rate that is 13% points higher than all non-Bridge to Finish participants at the same institutions.
Together, we can help them complete their education, make significant strides toward breaking the cycle of poverty and live out their brightest lives.
Investing in Hardest-Hit Communities
According to a report by Prosperity Now, Black workers in Seattle are three times more likely to be unemployed than white workers. Two out of there Black and Indigenous renters are cost burdened. And the average household income for white families is more than the average for Black and Indigenous families combined. So, while higher gas and food prices might be a concern for some, it crushes others with tough decisions—put food on the table or gas in the tank.
Your donations to The Neighbor Fund will help us support Black, Indigenous and other communities of color and dismantle racist systems that are at the root cause of these issues.
At United Way, we’re developing new ways of doing that work, like adopting a participatory funding approach, that puts the decision-making power in the hands of the people who know their communities the best and are most impacted by those funding decisions.
Costs are high, but the need is higher.
And the only thing keeping us from helping more people?
How much money we can raise together.
Ready to make every dollar count?
Let’s get started.